Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel (74 page)

“Nothing that we would call science. Like other major documents, it is poetic in nature, expressed in terms that were meaningful for them but remain mysterious to us. Here is an example: ‘
Two flames of the Lord of the Night-gods lie sleeping in the belly of the beast that is sacred to the Lord of the Night-Gods
’—their name for dragon.”

“And their name for the ship.”

“Yes. Like a dragon, it is an entity that flies, it is consecrated to their evil deity, and it is deadly.”

“What else does it say?”

“The text continues:
‘One flame is lesser and one is great. The lesser will awaken the greater, that the light of the Lord of the Night-gods may shine forth, be it soon or in ages hence. Then shall the sky-god be shamed as in days of old, and all shall bow down and remember the one who ever rules the heavens.’
 ”

Again Dariush paused in his recitation. “Go on,”, I said.

“ ‘
Prosperity and reward, the Lord of the Night-gods brings to the realms of man. Thus they will know that he bestows both good and ill, and those who follow him shall soar and know that they are gods.
’ ” Dariush cast a glance at me. “Here is the final entry, Neil: ‘
The gate is closed, and the chant of finding is placed in the middle tower on the high road that leads to bliss. The chant will show them the way
.’ ”

“The gate is closed?” I objected. “Wouldn’t this mean the scribe was interred inside the temple? He would have archived the tablet and then lain down to die.”

“Not necessarily. The gate may have been closed, leaving a single block open for the scribe to make his exit. No adult skeletal remains have been found in the temple crypt, despite our searches in all its sections. Though the millions of skeletons have not all been examined, the thousands that have been are, without exception, those of children. I think it likely that if the scribe had died there, his remains would be fairly close to the staircase or near the sculpture of his god.”

“Well, it’s a moot point. The deed was done. The chant indeed showed us the way.”

Dariush sighed. “ ‘
Those who follow him shall soar and know that they are gods.
’ The ancient temptation, you see.”

“Yes, I see”, I replied. “And I see more than that.”

“What do you see?” he asked expectantly.

“I see what religion does to human minds.”

*

Throughout the following weeks, I performed my cleaning tasks, lit the kindling in the fireplace, and fed the fire with larger pieces of wood, ate meals regularly, and tried to walk a little every day. I sat in the arboretum sometimes, and after locating its audio control panel, I resumed my early morning habit of listening to Mozart. Music as wave of spirit? Was there really such a thing as spirit? Was spirit sub-subatomic energy? What then was personality? What was beauty, and why did it affect the human bio-mechanism as positively as it did the plants? When I noticed that some of the smaller bushes were wilting for lack of water, I located the irrigation controls and took over that task as well. Mostly I kept to myself, restless and brooding.

I recall sitting among the soothing trees early one morning. I had by then found a way to silence the artificial birdcalls. That day, I felt indifferent to the usual music and left it off. There was a control for the sounds of wind, however, so I set the volume to low, sat back on the park bench, and closed my eyes.

I was again in the desert of New Mexico, perched on a fallen mesquite tree. My father was beside me, and at our feet a campfire crackled as it consumed twigs and the dead husks of bean pod. Sweet smoke was in the air.

Benigno
, he said,
I’d cut off both my legs if I thought it would help you walk straight
.

“How does a man walk straight in this life?” I whispered aloud. “How can a man know his duty?”

There is right, and there is wrong in this world, my son
.

“This I know,
Papacito
, this I know. But where are the borders?”

The borders are not east and west, Benigno; they are not north and south
.

“But how do I find them?”

Look up and you will find them
.

“Look up to the sky?”

Look up to the heavens above the heavens
.

“But that is what the aliens told us, the aliens who were ourselves.”

I speak of another heavens, the true heavens which you will find
.

“But it is too late for that now.”

Only when a man’s last breath has ceased is it too late. Turn now and climb
.

The campfire crackled as I threw another handful of bean pods onto the flames. They burst and flared, their sparks rising into the blue sky above the desert of New Mexico.

I opened my eyes, and my father was gone.

*

Turn now and climb
, he had said. But where would I turn? How would I climb? Gazing upward at the ceiling four stories above me, I watched electronic clouds passing across the illusion of infinite blue.

I returned to my room and sat down on the bed. I opened Xue’s Bible at random and stared at the inscrutable text, straining toward what I had lost. I could only sense it and did not know what it was. An impressionist memory-bank of origins perhaps,
piñatas
and feast days, a thousand times kneeling in the dust of the plaza to receive the host on my ignorant tongue, my mother’s tears, my father’s inexhaustible courage in the face of defeat. Perhaps, too, I needed to know that Xue had been real. Though he was gone, the volume in my hands was a touchstone of his presence.

*

I remember Dariush as the signal presence during my last portion of life. There is anguish in the memories, because of what happened.

We shared several good exchanges before the end. I recall especially the evening he appeared in my doorway with a whimsical Persian smile on his face.

“Neil, I have come to invite you to a celebration.”

“I’m not a crowd person, Dariush, but thanks anyway”, I said.

“It will be a crowd of two, my friend. Won’t you come? It is to honor a lady well known to us both.”

“Pia?”

“Today is December 12th on Earth, and if the space / time continuum has not played us a mischief, we may still celebrate the feast of the Mother of Guadalupe.”

“You know about her?”

“Who has not heard about her!”

His remark was highly debatable, but driven by simple curiosity, I got up and followed him.

He led me to the Mexican bistro, and therein I saw that he had been busy. Strings of multicolored Christmas lights had been hung from the ceiling, luminous in the darkened space. Chairs and tables had been pushed back, leaving only a solitary table and two chairs in the center of the room.

I half-smiled, wondering what he was up to. Like a gracious
maitre d’hotel
, he conducted me to the table and bade me take my seat. A white candle burned on the turquoise tablecloth.

From the bistro kitchen, he brought a steaming plate of tacos dribbled with salsa sauce. Back to the kitchen, he went and returned with another serving bowl. Setting it on the table with a flourish, he declared: “
Cucarachas
, Neil. I made it myself.”

I burst out laughing. “I think you mean
enchiladas
, Dariush.
Cucarachas
are cockroaches.”

He sat down and peered into the serving bowl, filled with tortillas smothered in hot chili peppers and sliced olives. Then he too erupted—a chortling old scholar’s laugh, his face turning red, tears of hilarity slipping from his eyes.

Why did we laugh like that? How was it possible we were still capable of laughter? Did we no longer care that so many people had died? No, I think it was because we cared so much, and the silly joke gave us a temporary reprieve from the crushing grief. When we had recollected ourselves, we began to eat. There was a flagon of nova-berry wine too, and a bottle of cold Mexican beer that we split between us.

Later, we sat back and looked at each other. I laughed again. He chortled noiselessly.

“You know, Dariush”, I said. “I think a lot about Kitha-ré and Pho-rion. Do you ever feel the way I do, that somehow you knew them personally? That they were part of your life?”

“Every day I feel this. I often reread their song. I try to imagine how it might have sounded when they sang it. Surely, they must have sung it together.”

“They probably did.”

“I ask myself what they would think if they visited the
Kosmos
.”

“They would think they’d arrived at the bliss in the heavens”, I said dryly.

“I suppose that is so.”

“Or they would have thought they were dreaming. I’m still puzzled by their innocence—if that’s what it was. How was it preserved in the midst of their civilization?”

“There is always a spark of goodness in the human heart, no matter how deeply buried in surrounding evils.”

“There’s always a spark of evil too, no matter how deeply buried in surrounding good.”

“Yes, this also is true. However, I would call it a lightless place within us, rather than a spark.”

“There’s always a killer hiding inside of us. Do you remember the shoot-out the day the pioneers left for Nova?”

“I heard a great deal about that most amazing event, though I arrived too late to observe it.”

“At one point, I aimed Paul’s pistol at Larson’s head. I was just about to pull the trigger. I wanted to pull it, but at the last moment, I pointed the barrel at the floor.”

“You couldn’t bring yourself to do it?” he asked with a solemn expression.

“I discovered I was quite capable of doing it. But I didn’t.”

“There is the inheritance of Cain inside each of us. And Abel.”

“Yes, well, I suppose that’s the case. The problem is, which will we turn out to be? One never knows until the moment arrives.”

“One never knows”, Dariush nodded.

For a time, we let the subject ride. I hoped it would fade out. It was veering too close to his belief system, and I did not want a repeat of our previous conversation.

But he was irrepressible, as I should have realized.

“Murder in the human heart”, he said quietly. “The violence as old as the story of Cain and Abel. Lately, Neil, I’ve been pondering those two brothers, and it seems to me that in a sense we are like a third brother.”

“A third brother?”

“We are witnesses to the scene through the hindsight of history, and yet we are also participants. When radical evil strikes, our instinctive response is to defend—especially to protect the innocent and vulnerable, is it not so?”

“Yes. That’s a good thing, wouldn’t you agree?”

“It is a necessary and just thing to do. Our response to evil, however, becomes problematic according to the ways we defend the good. In one form or another, this is the test we all must pass through.”

“But when you see the evil that goes on back home, all the deaths, all the confiscations of children, the persecution of your religion, don’t you ever feel an instinctive flash of horror, rage, and desire to kill the killers?”

“When I was younger, I overcame this instinct.”

When I was young, I had nurtured the instinct, then shelved it, biding my time. Throughout the following sixty years, there had been no opportunities to make retributive or preemptive strikes against the atrocities. Always I had searched for a way to stop the killing, yearned to eradicate the killer class in some big decisive way. But I never found one.

“When I was younger”, I said, “I did not overcome this instinct.”

“I understand, Neil. Yet do you see how the temptation, if it is not recognized for what it is, will grow and grow? Then comes the desire to
definitively
solve the murderous tendency in human nature by applying radical therapy. Is there not a voice inside us suggesting that if we kill enough of the killers, then the world will become safe for good people like ourselves? Do you see how we presume that
we
are good? Is this why most of mankind applauds a world-system of absolute control over all aspects of life, public and private—because we have been convinced this is the only way to abolish violence?”

“That’s what DSI is all about”, I said. “It’s what the world state has given us, and there aren’t any other options.”

“There are other options. They do not come easily to us, especially for those who must defend the weak. If there had been a third brother back then, on the terrible day when Cain’s rage and jealousy drove him to murder, would he not have been put to this test? Driven by powerful feelings, would he have picked up a rock and killed Cain in turn? Would he have called it justice? Would he have seen it as a necessary act for the preservation of peace and security in the lands east of Eden?”

I did not answer him. In a sense, he was speaking rhetorically. In another sense, he was cutting straight to the core of my struggle with life itself. Too often, he had done this to me, engaging me in conversations that gradually drew me into one of his sermons. He just wouldn’t leave well enough alone. He was my conscience-cricket, and it was getting on my nerves.

“Look, Dariush”, I said irritably. “Your beliefs help you to avoid despair. They make you peaceful in the middle of a firefight. They promise you justice in a future heaven, and so you never have to fight for it here and now.”

“Do you believe that?”

“Yeah”, I said. “Yeah, I do believe that. I like you and respect you as a man, but you make the mistake of always presuming you’re standing on the high road, and people like me are unenlightened. Maybe it’s the other way around.”

“If I have offended you. . .”

“Irresolvable questions”, I murmured dismissively. “Have some more
cucarachas
.”

He ate a token bite.

I ate one too, and not long after we parted.

*

Little did I know that the third brother would soon become the hand of justice—justice as he saw it. Arjuna rose up in our midst with Krishna standing behind him, pushing him on. Then Pinocchio stood up on his little wooden legs and lurched forward to resist him.